China has made a massive leap forward in its space programme.

One of the country's spacecrafts has docked with an orbiting module, 213 miles above Earth.

Three astronauts, including China's first female space traveller Lui Yang, will live and work on the module for several days as they prepare to man a permanent space station.

The Beijing Aerospace Control Center has announced the team has entered the experimental capsule of the Tiangong-1 space lab module, with their tasks including conducting an air sample collection.

The three astronauts will conduct scientific experiments in Tiangong-1 over the next few days.

Then they will go back to the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft, which will separate from Tiangong-1 and after that, the astronauts will execute China's first manual space docking.